Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, said during a speech last week at the Center for a New American Security that the drone and commando war waged by the United States will intensify and expand outside the declared combat zone over the next few years.

Panetta declared the “campaign against al Qaeda will largely take place outside declared combat zones, using a small-footprint approach that includes precision operations, partnered activities with foreign Special Operations Forces, and capacity building so that partner countries can be more effective in combating terrorism on their own.”

In addition to increasing the number of Predator and Reaper drones, Panetta said the Pentagon will add 8,000 commandos to its Special Operations Forces over the next five years.

The Pentagon boss said “to truly protect America, we must sustain and in some areas deepen our engagement in the world – our military, intelligence, diplomatic and development efforts are key to doing that.”

Targets include Boko Haram Islamic militants in Nigeria, Ansar Dine extremists in Mali, and al-Qaeda affiliates in Libya (the anti-Gaddafi rebels supported by the U.S. in Libya admitted they were members of al-Qaeda). Panetta placed the blame for the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi squarely on al-Qaeda.

The U.S. is suspected of running clandestine Special Forces in other African nations, including Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.

IMF Riots and the Specter of al-Qaeda

The oil exporting nation of Nigeria experienced national strikes and IMF riots earlier this year after the country’s government removed fuel subsidies and doubled the prices of transportation and commodities. As if on cue, the threat posed by yet another al-Qaeda spin-off, Boko Haram, emerged and dutifully followed the script: it wants to implement Sharia Law and eventually establish an Islamic State in Northern Nigeria.

On January 1 of this year, the bankster IMF loan sharking operation led Christine Lagarde ordered an end to the Nigerian subsidies following similar orders handed down to Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad.

“The people of Nigeria have been one of the world’s most vocal against IMF-induced austerity measures, student protests have been met with heavy-handed repression since 1986 and several times since then, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths,” Nile Bowie writes.

Boko Haram’s Unlikely Homeland Threat

The Department of Homeland Security recently underscored the threat of Boko Haram by issuing a report linking the group to al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and the Somalian militant group al-Shabaab.

“Although the document admits that Boko Haram poses a low threat to the US homeland, it cites the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a bomb in his underwear during a Christmas day flight on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as an instance where seemingly obscure terrorist organizations thought to lack capability to deploy militants to the United States were nearly successful, thus requiring increasing vigilance to combat an ever-increasing threat,” Bowie writes.

In February, 2010, historian Webster Tarpley explained that the underwear bomber, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was allowed to board Northwest Airlines flight 253 and attempt the detonation of a PETN bomb in order to produce a “large-scale political effect.” It also served as a theatric pretext for the implementation of radioactive naked body scanners in U.S. airports and the expansion of the police state on the home-front.

Job One: Destabilizing Africa

The destabilization of Nigeria was road-tested by Africom, the State Department, the Rand Corporation and Israeli military personnel. “The scenario envisioned rebel factions vying for control of the Niger Delta oil fields (the source of one of America’s top oil imports), which would potentially be secured by some 20,000 U.S. troops if a US-friendly coup failed to take place,” writes Bowie.

Panetta’s recent speech at the Center for a New American Security – a Democrat-centric national security think-tank embedded within the Obama administration – signals the next phase in a largely covert war in Africa as the global elite continue to expand their domination and control under the hyped-up rubric of the global war on terror.

In order to mask the threat posed by the natives – Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “vassals” and “barbarians” – who naturally react to the severe structural readjustment mandates imposed by the banksters, the intelligence apparatus has unleashed a tried and true boogieman, al-Qaeda and its various affiliates, a boogieman that begs for a response from Panetta and the Pentagon.